Why Malawi’s Groundwater Data Keeps Vanishing: A Systemic Diagnosis

Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, the water that sustains daily life lies underground, invisible and largely unmeasured. Malawi is one of the countries most dependent on this hidden resource: boreholes and wells supply drinking water to the majority of both rural and urban households, irrigate crops during increasingly erratic rainy seasons, and buffer communities against the droughts that climate change is making more frequent and more severe. Yet the data needed to manage this vital resource — measurements of how much water exists, where it is, and how it changes over time — remain persistently scarce. A new study published in PLOS Water argues that the reasons go far deeper than broken equipment or tight budgets, and that fixing the problem requires confronting the institutional and social architecture in which groundwater monitoring is embedded.

The research, led by Donald John Charles Robertson of the University of Glasgow together with colleagues from Malawian institutions and international partners, including Sydney Byrns, Rowan Ellis, Christopher J. White, Muthi Nhlema, Given Ngwira, Zione Butao, Mike Myaba, Macpherson Nkhata, and Tracy Morse, set out to understand why Malawi’s groundwater monitoring networks so often fall silent. The team deliberately avoided the conventional framing that treats monitoring failure as a purely technical or financial problem. Instead, they applied a co-creation methodology, bringing together stakeholders from across the water sector — from government hydrogeologists and district water officers to non-governmental organisations and, crucially, community representatives — to diagnose the problem collectively through a series of participatory workshops held in Malawi.

Co-creation, as the authors describe it, is more than consultation. Rather than presenting stakeholders with a predefined problem and asking for feedback, the process invited participants to shape the analysis itself, drawing on their own experience of how monitoring actually operates — and fails — on the ground. The researchers supplemented the workshops with sourced grey literature, the often hard-to-find reports, assessments, and institutional documents that capture how water management functions in practice but rarely make it into peer-reviewed journals. This combination of evidence and lived experience allowed the team to trace the pathways through which data collection breaks down, from the national level down to the communities where wells are actually located.

What emerged was a picture of systemic and interconnected challenges rather than a single point of failure. The first major theme was institutional and governance fragmentation. Responsibility for groundwater in Malawi is distributed across multiple ministries, departments, and agencies, each with its own mandate, priorities, and reporting lines. Data collected by one institution may not be shared with another; standards for measurement and record-keeping may differ; and no single body holds clear accountability for the health of the monitoring network as a whole. The result is a patchwork in which valuable measurements are taken but then lost to the system, duplicated, or never converted into the long, continuous time series that water resource management requires.

The second theme, procedural ambiguity, compounds the first. Participants in the workshops described situations where the procedures governing who should collect groundwater data, how often, with what instruments, and where the resulting records should be deposited were unclear, outdated, or simply absent. Field officers may lack formal guidance on monitoring protocols; equipment may sit unused because no one is assigned responsibility for its maintenance; and data that are collected may languish in paper logbooks or personal files rather than entering centralised databases. Ambiguity, the study suggests, is not a minor administrative nuisance but a structural condition that allows monitoring to quietly lapse without anyone being formally at fault.

Financing emerged as a third, closely related theme — but not in the simple sense of there being too little money. Participants described limited and uncertain financing, in which budgets for monitoring are unpredictable, short-cycle, and vulnerable to reallocation when competing priorities arise. Donor-funded projects may establish or revitalise monitoring networks, but when project funding ends, the recurrent costs of sustaining the network — staff time, vehicle fuel, instrument calibration, data management — often have no committed source. The study’s framing is important here: the problem is not merely the quantum of funding but its structure, which rewards visible new investments over the unglamorous continuity that monitoring demands.

Perhaps the most distinctive finding concerns community engagement. The co-creation process revealed a lack of formalised mechanisms for involving communities in groundwater monitoring, despite the fact that local people are often the first to notice when a borehole dries up, when water levels drop, or when water quality changes. Participants emphasised that communities hold practical knowledge and a sustained presence that professional monitoring programmes cannot replicate, yet no institutional framework exists to channel that knowledge into the national data system. Formalising community participation — through training, defined roles, and recognised reporting pathways — was identified as a promising avenue for expanding the reach and resilience of monitoring without requiring proportional increases in professional staffing.

A central conclusion of the study is that these challenges cannot be addressed in isolation. The authors found that participants consistently emphasised the interconnections: fragmented governance produces procedural ambiguity; ambiguity makes it difficult to justify and protect financing; uncertain financing undermines any attempt to formalise community engagement; and the absence of community involvement removes the local accountability that might otherwise pressure institutions to maintain the network. Data scarcity, in this reading, is not the disease itself but a symptom — the visible surface manifestation of deeper systemic issues in how water resources are governed, resourced, and valued.

This framing carries significant implications for how the international community responds to groundwater data gaps. Technical fixes such as new sensors, satellite-based estimation, or digital data platforms are frequently proposed as solutions to monitoring scarcity, and they can play a valuable role. But the Malawian evidence suggests that technology deployed into a fragmented institutional landscape, without clear procedures, stable financing, and community buy-in, is likely to join the ranks of previously installed equipment that is no longer operational. The study’s authors argue that future efforts, both in Malawi and in other global contexts facing similar challenges, should prioritise adaptive and inclusive strategies rather than one-off interventions.

Concretely, the findings point to three priorities: strengthened institutional coordination so that responsibilities for groundwater monitoring are clearly assigned and data flows between agencies; updated procedural guidance that gives field officers and local actors unambiguous instructions on what to measure, how, and where to send the results; and an expanded, formalised role for community participation in monitoring activities. None of these is a quick fix, and the co-creation approach itself suggests that the process of designing solutions matters as much as the solutions — those who must sustain a monitoring system should help build it. For a country whose climate resilience increasingly depends on knowing what lies beneath its feet, the study offers both a sobering diagnosis and a practical roadmap. The water is there; the challenge is building the human systems to keep watching it.

Subject of Research: Systemic causes of groundwater monitoring data scarcity in Malawi identified through stakeholder co-creation

Article Title: Persistent groundwater data scarcity: Challenges and advancements from a co-creation process in Malawi

Article References: Robertson, D. J. C., Byrns, S., Ellis, R., White, C. J., Nhlema, M., Ngwira, G., Butao, Z., Myaba, M., Nkhata, M., & Morse, T. (2026). Persistent groundwater data scarcity: Challenges and advancements from a co-creation process in Malawi. PLOS Water, 5(9), e0000593. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000593

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000593

Keywords: groundwater, Malawi, water monitoring, co-creation, data scarcity, water governance, community engagement, hydrology, climate resilience, PLOS Water, institutional fragmentation, water resources